From MavenSearch newsletter, 23 July 2002:
The Jewish Community of Cape Town, South Africa
http://www.bh.org.il/Communities/Archive/CapeTown.aspFounded in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company as a victualing station at the Cape Of Good Hope, southernmost tip of Africa, on the sea route to India and the Far East. The town had Jews among its early settlers. The rules of the company, however, allowed only Protestants as settlers; two Jews were converted to Christianity in Cape Town as early as 1669. After the British occupation of the Cape in 1806, a steady flow of Jewish immigrants came from Central Europe and England and later, in larger numbers, from Eastern Europe. Source: http://www.mavensearch.com. Category: South Africa.

Beth Hatefutsoth Country Communities Project: Jewish Dorps

The South African Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth was established in 1983 following the temporary photographic exhibition of The Jews of South Africa show in Tel Aviv and in South Africa. In August 1992, South African Friends committee, under the chairmanship of Dennis Fox, undertook a research project to document the history of the Jewish communities that lived in the "dorps" of South Africa in order to fill the gaps in the Museum. Currently, in 2003, the research is still under way. Over 1400 places have been identified as having had a Jewish presence. To contact us or to request books on "Jewish Life in the South African Country Communities" please email us via museum@beyachad.co.za

History and educational web-site covering the following topics:
1.. Worksheets for English Literature
2.. Aspects of World History
3.. East London, South Africa
4.. South Africa: A Brief History
5.. German Settlers to the Eastern Cape
http://www.knowledge4africa.com

Lewis Family: Stephen Lewis' Genealogy Page. The history of the Lewis line of the family. Dedicated to Isaac Lewis who became largely responsible for the industrialisation of the Transvaal. http://www.sterlingtimes.co.uk/genealogy.htm (38.3 KBytes).

A large web-site almost entirely devoted to South African resources. Curiously, many e-mail and web-site addresses are displayed as text and not as live links. You will need to "copy & paste"
the addresses into your browser or e-mail program.http://www.genealogyworld.net

This link leads to a page which includes various items of information about the following countries: Egypt, Ethiopia, Morocco, South Africa, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.
Web: http://jewishwebindex.com/africa.htm

The National Archives Repository is in possession of considerable sources with regard to genealogical research. http://www.national.archives.gov.zaVoters rolls 1936-1978: Unfortunately limitations of time and staff precludes the archive from doing extensive photocopying and research on behalf of members of the public. Emmerentia van Rensburg emmerentia@worldonline.co.za, a private researcher, will do the research and photocopying for you in exchange for an agreed fee.
See also our NASA page

These are lists, usually in book form, and they contain the names of subscribers or sponsors who supported the compilation and production of the book by payment or donation prior to its publication. Prenumeranten are a rich source of genealogical data and are likely to be accurate because the subscribers paid for the privilege of inclusion. The term is a Yiddish word meaning prior numbers. Harduf's Transliterated English<>Yiddish Dictionary gives numeriren for number. Alternative spellings are: prenumeraten, prenumeratin, prenumeratn.

Approximate dates for construction of various sections of the railways in South Africa. Very useful as Burman's book (Cape railways only) stops at 1910 and leaves out a few post-Union lines in the Cape:
http://steamfan.topcities.com/Stations/station.htmhttp://steamfan.topcities.comTopographical maps - first 1:250 000 then 1:50 000 which can be ordered from the Surveyor-General in Cape Town should be the best source for railway siding names as they were drawn in the early 1980's when even the most obscure station siding was still operational before privatization. The Surveyor-General's website is:
http://w3sli.wcape.gov.za/

Centre for Jewish Migration & Genealogy Studies
Web-site: http://tinyurl.com/Rootsbankor http://chrysalis.its.uct.ac.za/CGI/cgi_Rootweb.exeThe primary aim of the project is to research the estimated 15,000 core families who migrated to Southern Africa between 1850-1950 from England, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus:
• to map the entire history of Jewish migration to South Africa with the aim of providing authoritative and definitive data for the Discovery Centre at the South African Jewish Museum (SAJM),
• to integrate the genealogical data in multi-disciplinary research initiatives under the auspices of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town.

This website, set up by the Israeli MOD, has a searchable database of all those who fell in Israel's battles since 1948. Individual pages for each biography. Data is entirely in Hebrew.
http://www.izkor.gov.il/izkor80.htm

Newsgroups (a.k.a. discussion groups) are public discussion areas on the Internet and they were active many years before the World-Wide Web became a reality. Twenty-five years ago (1980s-1990s) there were reputedly over 30,000 newsgroups covering every conceivable topic. Many newsgroups are now dormant or empty but others are resonant with requests for information, debate and trivia. The newsgroups represent a kind of hidden world and most people do not go beyond the boundaries of e-mail and the World-Wide Web.

Your Internet browser should include a facility, usually the e-mail program, to read newsgroups and to post messages to them. You may need to ask your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to make the service available. You can also view newsgroups via a web-site.

Commencing in about 2002, six South Africa-specific search engines were listed here. They were Aardvark, Ananzi, Max, SA Web, SA Worm and Zebra. In September 2003, only Ananzi remains active. It suffers from a very slow response time.

The search engines all have different indexes and contents and will produce different results when searching. It is recommended that you try several for the same query.

Researching a topic or country via large general-purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo does not always produce interesting and useful results. You can however use Google and Yahoo to easily find specialist search engines by entering "search engine" AND countryname or "search engine" AND topicname into the query box.

Please note that telephone directories are likely to be incomplete. Telephone users may have taken over an account and never changed the previous owner's name to their own name, they may have registered their accounts in names other than their own, eg. spouse, pre-marriage or business name, use of some mobile telephones may be anonymous, some telephone companies do not allow access to their customer indexes: